IAN SWANKIE

The pioneering Moscow collectors Shchukin and Morozov emigrated after the Revolution and their collections were united to create the pioneering State Museum of New Western Art.  In 1948, however, Stalin ordered its closure. This lecture recounts the museum's history.  It tells how a brave female curator helped rescue the museum's most radical paintings for the Hermitage amid fears they would be destroyed, and what happened next to Matisse's The Dance and dozens of Cubist masterpieces by Picasso.

Rosamund Bartlett

Rosamund is a writer, lecturer and translator whose work ranges across the arts. She completed her doctorate at Oxford and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College. Rosamund has written numerous books. She is returning to give this lecture, a sequel to her outstanding talk about Mattise in Moscow earlier this year.